A SAR interferogram filter based on the empirical mode decomposition method

In order to obtain a more accurate topographic model, a noise filtering step must be performed before the unwrapping of phase. In this article, a filter for suppressing speckle in SAR interferogram is proposed. The filter is based on the empirical mode decomposition (EMD) method which can separate the information to parts with different scale, when the parts related to the speckle is subtracted from the original interferogram, the speckle noise is reduced. The result is compared to that of two other methods and shows that EMD method is powerful to interferogram speckle noise reduction, as well as it can preserve fine details in the interferogram that are directly related to the ground topography and maintain phase values distribution.